English

From the tender years of his youth, Ridha Behi would slink from school to the nearby movie theater and discover masterworks of the silver screen. It was then that he was smitten with the magnetism of Marlon Brando. Years later Behi, now an award-winning filmmaker, met Anis Raache, a young Tunisian actor who bears an uncanny resemblance to Brando. Inspired, he wrote a script casting the two. He attempted to contact the Hollywood legend for years and, through hopelessly circuitous channels, dispatched the screenplay to him. In 2004, Béhi received a phone call from Brando and was summoned to his hilltop mansion in Los Angeles to discuss the project. In the spring of that year, Behi spent days reworking the script with the dispirited star, but by summer, Brando’s health gave out and he died.

Always Brando elegantly blends the director’s chronicle of his real-life saga with Brando and the fictional story of Raache, a young Tunisian whose destiny veers toward tragedy once his resemblance to the star promises success and fame in Hollywood. Behi weaves in elements of the script Brando had signed on for prior to his death, namely the unvarnished reality of a penniless young Arab man in post-9/11 America. The result is at once a layered, loving, lucid elegy to cinema and the director’s naked, uncontrived meditation on the art and its trade, its imperious lure and the cruelty of its system – themes Behi eloquently explored to great critical acclaim in his previous feature, The Magic Box (2002).- Rasha Salti